Thursday, 9 March 2017

Images

How often do Poul Anderson's characters meet before images of the Gods?

Pillars are carved to show the twelve highest gods here.
Panels bear pictures of the Gods here.
Gods are carved on pillars here.

Emberverse Wiccans have:

"...images of the Lord and Lady over the hearth..."
-SM Stirling, The Protector's War (New York, 2006), Chapter Seven, pp. 193-194.

A neighbor on Blades St has the horned god and the goddess on an altar in a small room upstairs in his house. In the Zen group, we have the Buddha on the altar with scrolls showing Bodhidarma and Kuan Yin hanging behind it. And some other neighbors understandably make no image of the transcendent.

2 comments:

Paul:Early in *Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen* by H. Beam Piper, Calvin Morrison sees what he takes (correctly) to be religious images over the hearth of a peasant house. He makes a reverent gesture to them, because he figures (again correctly) that this will convey to his hosts that whatever he is (he can't speak or understand their language), he's not some kind of heathen.

Technically, he IS a heathen by their standards, since he has no idea who their deities are. But showing respect buys him some goodwill. Helping his hosts defend themselves, an hour or so later, from foreign raiders buys even more ... and a legend is begun.

We also sometimes see characters created by Poul Anderson in Christian churches. One example being how Dominic Flandry visited St. Clement's Cathedral in A KNIGHT OF GHOSTS AND SHADOWS. I recall how mention was made of people seeing a mosaic image of Christ as Pantocrator surrounded by the Twelve Apostles.